Bear - Markdown Notes

Soon as you try Bear, you’d probably need no other notes app again. It’s the most versatile and comprehensive app of its class that does anything and everything you need a note-taking app to do, and more.

Beautiful app targeted at capturing, writing organizing daily activities of planning one’s life. It’s awesome and the perfect event planner.

Bear is a popular note-taking app designed for users who prefer minimalism and markdown formatting. It offers a clean, distraction-free interface, making it easy to focus on writing. Bear’s powerful organizational features—like tagging with hashtags and linking notes with “wiki” style links—make it especially useful for users managing large volumes of notes or ideas. Markdown support is intuitive, so formatting is quick and easy for those familiar with it. However, Bear is available only on Apple devices, limiting cross-platform compatibility. The lack of collaborative features can also be a drawback for team-oriented work. Overall, Bear is an excellent choice for personal writing, journaling, or any text-driven projects on iOS or macOS.

This app is exactly what I have been looking for. I'm so happy that I came across it tonight and decided to take a chance with it. It's wonderful!

Bear is a great notes/planning/external brain for iOS. Highly reliable and easily modified to personal preference via tagging and markdown. Would be a five star for me if the handwriting/drawing space worked a little better. As it is, the handwriting insert is proportionally very narrow compared to the available page space and can be even narrower if it is inserted while sidebars are open. As a user who primarily brainstorms with Apple Pencil, this can make my workflow a little awkward.

I am doing a comparison first between Bear and Apple notes. They are pretty much feature comparable the notes has a couple of unique features that Bear does not such as the ability to collapse, headings or subheadings. But my real interest in Bear was looking for an Apple Watch app to create and view notes. Apple’s note app does not have an Apple Watch app, unfortunately. So it is between Bear and Drafts and Cheatsheet. Bear’s notes look the best on the Apple Watch, but is missing features in the Drafts and Cheatsheet apps, for example, the ability to search for a note, add tags or pin a note in the watch apparently, so that is very disappointing. Suggestions or comments from other users are welcome, as well of course as from the developer.

Finally an app that has a solid UI and is just downright beautiful and intuitive. I know Bear has its roots as an IOS app, but I would love to see this grow from an app, to a full fledged productivity platform. As a former Evernote user who left their platform due to a growing lackluster experience, Bear could easily snatch up their market share who’s eager for a fresh experience. Give me a web and windows app, let me create teams and invite external contributors, bonus if there were exposed APIs. I genuinely feel Bear has everything going for it, it just needs to graduate from the app mindset and set its eyes on becoming a true productivity platform.

After auditioning most of the popular note taking apps, Bear is a clear winner! It’s not bloated and glitchy (Evernote), it’s not impossibly complicated (Notion), it’s not chaotic (Obsidion), and it’s not too simple that it lacks important features (Apple Notes). It’s also not outrageously expensive. Bear just does what it should do as a note taking app! It allows me to build a second brain with visual and intuitive organization and capable tech to capture what and how I want to capture. As someone who likes folders, I had to accept their tag system instead…but it works like folders well enough that I’m ok with that. All in all, this is the note taking app for me!

Bear does a great job allowing you to search within individual notes, which is helpful. However, the general search functionality is now disappointing. While it used to locate keywords inside notes during a general search, this feature no longer works. It’s frustrating. Without this, navigating through large amounts of content becomes tedious. Bear is still a solid app, but this regression in search functionality is a big letdown.

God I would give anything to have back the old Bear. She worked flawlessly…. now she’s only a shell of what she once was.